The Impact of Internet Use on Relationships Between Teachers and Students

Abstract

A 5-year primarily qualitative study of a major effort to bring the Internet to a large urban school district in the United States suggests that Internet use brought about unplanned as well as planned change in classroom roles and relationships. Specifically, it increased student autonomy, due to factors including increased student access to external resources, technical difficulties arising when students all tried to do the exact same thing on the Internet, and a reversal of the usual knowledge disparity between teachers and students. Internet use also frequently resulted unexpectedly in warmer and less ad-versarial teacher-student relations, due to factors including the tendency for Internet use to lead to small group work which in turn personalized student-teacher relations, increased student enjoyment and motivation, teachers' discovery of unexpected Internet skills on the part of students who had not otherwise impressed them, and increased autonomy, which influenced the affective tone of student-teacher relations in direct and indirect ways.